Flooding risks in mountain areas

Project details

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EU contribution:

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CSC - Cost-sharing contracts

Objective

To identify and analyse the parameters that determine thegoverning meteorological, hydraulic, morphological and erosionprocesses in mountain and hilly areas, and to develop amethodology to translate any climatic changes into changedflooding risks.

Flooding hazards in mountain areas are most often caused by acombination of flash floods and strong variations in bed levelsdue to large sediment inputs into the river. The current risk offlooding in mountain areas will change due to significantclimatic changes influencing rainfall characteristics,desertification, evaporation, vegetation cover, snow melt, riverhydrography and sediment yield of the river basin.

A number of strongly related research topics have been identifiedto cover the complete subject:

Climate change scenarios for theMediterranean region will be identified using the results ofavailable climate models and a method of so-called downscaling.

These scenarios will render the boundary conditions for the waterand sediment supply into the river. The water supply (riverhydrograph) will be calculated using a combination of availablesophisticated and simpler rainfall-runoff models. Thiscombination will enable the simulation of the hydrologicprocesses for long periods.

The sediment supply into the riversystem due to erosion is highly variable. The research projectwill include an accurate analysis of the sources of sediment,improvement of the knowledge about the various erosion processesand development of tools for mathematical modelling of theprocesses involved.

The water and sediment supplies will betranslated into flooding risks using mathematical descriptions ofthe water and sediment movement in mountain rivers. Bothanalyses of the governing physical processes and mathematicaldescription will be executed in the project to make a soundlybased prediction of the water levels and bed levels to beexpected in mountain streams.

For the risk assessment offlooding hazards, probabilistic design methods will be applied.The flooding risks will be made visible by means of flooding riskmaps. The methodology developed in the project will be testedusing data of at least one European medium sized mountainwatershed.